The author of bestseller Waiting to Exhale recently visited South Africa to promote her new novel. Terry McMillan spoke to MARIANNE BRACE
AIR JAMAICA ought to be paying Terry McMillan commission. The heroine of her new novel, How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Viking), goes to the West Indies for a little rest and relaxation, and finds true love with a man half her age. Now, when McMillan does readings from the book, she gets accosted by women who have packed their bags. “I’m not exaggerating,” McMillan says. “A lot of little old ladies come up waving their airline tickets, saying: `I’m going to Jamaica to get my groove back, baby!'”
A graduate of Berkeley and Columbia Film School, McMillan, 44, has been described as the black Judith Krantz. Since her third novel, Waiting to Exhale, sold four million copies and was turned into a soapy film starring Whitney Houston, McMillan has become African-America’s pop princess. At readings, she causes the kind of stir normally reserved for film stars. “I’ve had a number of situations where they’ve had to have crowd control,” she says. “I get sometimes 2 000 people showing up. I am not kidding you.”
Perhaps they come simply to glimpse success. When McMillan started writing, she was a single mother who had gone through alcohol and cocaine abuse. Her son’s father was unemployed: “I knew things weren’t working out and I was going to have to get rid of this man.” She would get up at 5am to write, before hurrying Solomon off to his childminder and going to her job as a secretary.
These days, McMillan lives in a large house in California, commands around $6-million per book and has been credited with creating a whole new genre. Waiting to Exhale not only stayed on the US bestseller list for 38 weeks – for many readers it was their first book ever. While Toni Morrison and Alice Walker had brought African-American female experience to a wide audience, for some these pioneers are simply too literary, too intimidating and too backward-looking.
McMillan’s books are about contemporary black women. Her characters are high achievers, they wear nice clothes, travel first-class, call each other “bitch” and “girlfriend”, talk about “doing the nasty” and tell each other: “You snooze, you lose.” But for all of them, the bottom line is “lurve”. Every character, however stacked her bank balance, knows she’s gotta have it. But even if he’s tall, dark and handsome, it’s no good unless he shows her some respect.
McMillan was the first of her family to go to university. Her mother, who worked in a factory, was not educated: “She told me point blank: you will go to college and you’re not going with a baby. You keep your little legs closed and keep your mind on your books.”
McMillan wrote her first book, Mama, in a couple of weeks; it was followed by the sassy Disappearing Acts. Nothing prepared her, however, for the success of Waiting to Exhale. The ensuing hoopla “started getting on my nerves. It just got to be a little overwhelming.”
Some black feminists, moreover, gave McMillan a hard time. “Some critics seemed to think all these women, their lives, just revolved around men,” she says, raising her eyes to the ceiling. “But they missed the whole point. These characters are dealing with ageing parents, single parenthood, betrayal. All they want to be able to do is meet someone they can bond with, then continue on their journey.”
Anyway, she adds unapologetically: “Everybody wants to be loved, wants to be appreciated, admired, respected, and if somebody puts you on a pedestal, you will love being up there. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. It just so happens they are healthy heterosexual women. You hear what I’m saying?”
How Stella Got Her Groove Back is McMillan’s most autobiographical book yet. When her mother and her best friend died within a year of one another, McMillan had to abandon the novel she was working on. “I was sort of comatose and didn’t have anything in me to write with.”
She decided to take a holiday in Jamaica. There, she met Jonathan, a Jamaican in his 20s who now lives with her in America. Like Stella, however, McMillan was anxious about whether she was doing the right thing.
“That’s what makes it autobiographical. It taught me a lot about giving yourself permission to do things you really want to do …
“To me, literature should give you hope. I can be depressed all by myself. I don’t need to read a book.”